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The linked blog post is stupid. You can't judge a language based on its most popular web framework. (Rails is *not* Ruby!) HTML tables have nothing to do with programming. They work, so who cares!?

The real problem with Arc (and a lot of other new lisps; Clojure for example) is that it tries to be not Lisp by forcing syntax onto the user. The point of Lisp is that syntax is words and lists. When you start adding a bunch of weird-ass constructs to the language, you end up with a really shitty version of Perl. Except Arc doesn't have any regex library.

Anyway, don't get too upset about Arc. pg's points about Blub still hold... if you want to laugh hysterically sometime, remember that there is a whole world of people that think PHP is the perfect programming language. (See this discussion on pg's own site, the results are... hilarious: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181993 [ycombinator.com]. Note that PHP programmers consider OO, regular expressions, and libries "academic" and "not necessary for the real world". Give me my cut-n-paste!!111!)

Anyway, my point is that although Arc isn't really that exciting, your post doesn't really add much to the discussion. You don't like Arc. Great.

It's not that I don't like Arc. I really don't know enough about it and two of the things that I would need to use it seriously simply aren't there. I also agree completely with Graham about 'blub'. My issue is that he spent a lot of time getting people excited about, well, nothing much. If you're going to whip people into a lather about something and it's not vapourware, you're going to look pretty silly when it fails to live up to its hype [wikipedia.org].